Life in the Himalayas, Thirty Years Back

A Flash Flood, Remembered

The recent floods in Nepal brought back a memory from 2001, when we witnessed a flash flood ourselves. If you have lived in the mountains, you know that rivers are a kind of background noise. The water usually flows so hard that you can hear it long before you see it. And because these rivers generally run through the valley, away from where people actually live, a flash flood rarely touches the general population directly.

I spent my childhood and adolescence in the hills, and even though I have now been away for almost twenty years, I still think of myself as a “Hill Person,” a Pahadi at heart. We used to go to the streams near our house all the time, and to the bigger rivers once in a while. We would lose hours there, hunting for smooth stones or chasing tadpoles that we were convinced were fish. Flash floods never crossed our minds, and neither did the thought of slipping while crossing the water. We were not swimmers, so we stayed out of the water anyway, helped along by the fear of a mother’s scolding waiting for us at home.

A Different River, A Different Crowd

Our ancestral village, on the other hand, sat right on the banks of the Ganga, and the plains came with their own surprises. The river there was full of filth and things we had no words for as children. And unlike the hill streams where you would barely spot another soul, the ghats were crowded, people everywhere, all the time.

Getting to the plains was its own adventure. We made the journey every couple of years, and it was long and arduous by design, since we used every mode of transport available: buses, boats, trains, Commander taxis, and yes, even horse carriages. The whole trip took days. Was it difficult? Of course. Was it fun and unforgettable? Also, of course.

What Isolation Actually Looked Like

Back then, not many people were drawn to these places, so the population stayed sparse. For the longest time, the roads were bad enough that a bottled cold drink never made it up in one piece, so we grew up on tetra-pack Frooti instead. Newspapers, when you could find them, were a couple of days old, and only in the bigger towns. All of this meant limited access, and it was that limited access which kept the population small and the place, in its own way, sustainable.

The Hills Today

There is no arguing that these places are far more reachable now, and for the people who actually live there, that is a real boon. But it has also brought an influx that the hills were never quite built for. The Shimlas and the Mussoories up north had always drawn tourists, but the truly remote areas saw very little of that traffic. There was simply no infrastructure, and no real chance of people getting stranded the way they do now, because there weren’t enough people going there to begin with.

The scale of what happened in Nepal is different, but it points to the same underlying shift, the sheer amount of activity now happening in the hills. A large office had to be set up just to manage the border crossing. Thousands of workers were caught in the tunnels, and many are still stuck there, days later.

A Different Lens

Visiting these places, living there even for a while, can be life-changing. But that same footfall puts real pressure on an ecosystem that was already fragile to begin with. Roads, bridges, buildings, dams, all of it needs to be looked at through a different lens here. A development model that works everywhere else does not automatically work for the Himalayas.

Nepal’s tragedy is one more entry in a long, growing list of natural calamities the world keeps witnessing. If there is a lesson in it, it is perhaps this: we need to slow down, and think twice before we keep harnessing these fragile regions for hydroelectric power or tourism the way we have through recent history.